What will replace the Yellow Pages? Yext Perhaps?

Whether you’re looking for an address, a phone number, or hours of operation, online business listings often have incorrect or outdated information. To make matters worse, search results often vary across the web. Whose information are you going to trust – Google, Yahoo!, or Yelp? After this week’s announcement that AT&T is selling a majority stake in the Yellow Pages, this may become a bigger issue. At least the Yellow Pages usually had accurate phone numbers, and as it slowly fades into oblivion due to dramatically declining revenue, will anything replace it as a repository of verified business listings?

Yext.com, a New York-based technology startup, is trying to fill the online information gap. Even its name, “Yext” stands for “the next Yellow Pages,” according to Howard Lerman, co-founder and CEO of the company. Their B2B product, “Power Listings,” allows businesses to ensure that their information is correct and synced seamlessly across thirty-six sites ranging from Google to Foursquare. The startup’s goal is to help people find the right local information, whether they’re searching from their mobile phone or home computer. But right now, information is a mess due to “data aggregation problems” online. “If you think the local information syncing problem is tough for a business with one location to keep it straight on Foursquare, Yahoo! and all those different places, imagine how hard it is for a company with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of locations,” Lerman says in the interview embedded above.

As a young entrepreneur, Lerman has faced plenty of challenges, but he continues to remain optimistic. “We see the glass as 1/100th full,” he says. And he should. Yext already has signed up over 40,000 businesses and is generating real revenue. It is one of the many successfully growing startups to emerge in New York’s “Silicon Alley” over the past few years. “There’s a lot of energy here,” says Lerman, and with Facebook opening a new engineering office, the tech community in New York should keep growing. Google already has a large footprint in the city with a major office that attracts top engineers and talent from all over the world. These large tech companies, along with local venture capital firms like Union Square Ventures and incubators like TechStars, are creating an ecosystem to help get startups off the ground. Lerman’s advice to New York’s young entrepreneurs? “Go after a huge market with an amazing team,” and “be willing to change constantly.”